INRIASAC: Simple Hypernym Extraction Methods

For information retrieval, it is useful to classify documents using a hierarchy of terms from a domain. One problem is that, for many domains, hierarchies of terms are not available. The task 17 of SemEval 2015 addresses the problem of structuring a set of terms from a given domain into a taxonomy without manual intervention. Here we present some simple taxonomy structuring techniques, such as term overlap and document and sentence cooccurrence in large quantities of text (English Wikipedia) to produce hypernym pairs for the eight domain lists supplied by the task organizers. Our submission ranked first in this 2015 benchmark, which suggests that overly complicated methods might need to be adapted to individual domains. We describe our generic techniques and present an initial evaluation of results.